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We’ve got lots of things “cooking” but we wanted to make a quick release (download here) to fix Hulu as well as provide some important enhancements to the media server.

FIX: Hulu playback was broken when the site exploited a bug in our code, which has now been fixed.

NEW: Support for variably-sized Flash/Silverlight content (and also for sizes changing on the fly). You can now specify negative values in the site configuration for cropping, mouse operations, and in seekbars. A negative X or width value indicates the number of pixels from the right, and a negative Y or height value specifies negative pixels from the bottom. (Specifying 0 for width/height means “the entire width/height”, this should help for sites such as Vimeo.)

NEW: We’ve moved the Plex Python plug-in framework into a plug-in named Framework.bundle (great idea, James!). Among other things, this fixes the issue with the code signature breaking on the Plex Media Server and the Leopard firewall getting upset about it. This also allows us to have multiple concurrent versions of the framework for backwards compatibility. We take this sort of thing very seriously, as we want you to be able to write plug-ins without fear of them breaking with API changes.

Also, we’ve had lots of developer interest, and we’re now working with a few people on some upcoming plug-ins. In order to prevent duplication of effort, we’ve added a page to the wiki which lists the plug-ins that are in progress. We’ll be adding more to that page (Isaac threw it up quickly from memory), but please add to it if you’re working on a plug-in; you can provide your forum name in the contact section so that others can contact you to help out.

There have been some plug-ins developed which will likely not find a place in the Plex App Store, such as the 18+ plug-ins. We’d still like to encourage good organization and structure for these “unofficial” plug-ins, so Isaac has created a wiki template for you to use. If you have one of these plug-ins, please add a page to the wiki for it, and either upload the zipped bundle to the wiki or add an external link to it. You can then add a link to the new page on the unsupported plug-ins index page. Thanks very much!

This is one of my favorite photos of Barkley. I’m not sure why he was sitting like that on the stairs, but he looks quite regal.

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27 Comments

Riviera March 10, 2009 at 2:15 am

Great new release. Will need to get used to the smaller writing for the items in the menu that are not currently selected, but I think it’s definitely more useful this way as you know “where you’re going”.

Am I the only one who is still being prompted by the firewall for the Media Server despite the fix?

FLX March 10, 2009 at 2:48 am

Hahaha, i love how he sits! As if he’s about to soil your stairs. You got a crazy dog
Thanks for the updates! Love your work!

salar March 10, 2009 at 6:05 am

thanks for the new update..!
Did the menu change? they look so much closer to each other…! I liked the old one

salar March 10, 2009 at 6:09 am

btw is there anyway to get the old backgrounds for app store and favorites?

Keane16 March 10, 2009 at 8:49 am

I like the new menu, still large enough to read from across the room, and now we can see more options without having to scroll through the lot.

Hopefully all this will be irrelevant when Aeon Stark is tweaked to make it compatible.

Good work guys.

Wei March 10, 2009 at 9:21 am

I LOVE the new menu. It’s like the dock on my Mac where the highlighted one enlarges. It also gives me a better idea of all the options out there instead of cycling through the list to find em.

Just an aside, but the release notes on the main page keep pointing to the 0.7.8 (Brave new world) release.

elan March 10, 2009 at 10:44 am

I apologize, I completely forgot to mention the UI changes in the home page. We made the tweaks in order to replace the images with others that we felt better matched the existing photographic style, and to make more of the menu items visible at the same time. We’re trying to make improvements in baby steps as we head towards a skin more uniquely suited to the direction in which we’re taking Plex.

oblada March 10, 2009 at 11:52 am

So is someone working on a “Plex”-skin then? Or what do you mean by “we head towards a skin more uniquely suited to the direction in which we’re taking Plex.”?

andreas March 10, 2009 at 1:13 pm

the new UI improvements are great! but the help section along with the app store changes backdrops while selected. a bit confusing.

Kevin March 10, 2009 at 1:29 pm

Sorry I can’t agree with the menu changes. I liked the spacing of the old. It is probably because I have turned off everything except movies, TV show, Pictures and applications. Now it just looks like it duplicates as a bug.

Would love to see a preference that allows me to control that, or have it dynamically scale according to what you have set to visible.

Rich March 10, 2009 at 8:40 pm

Awesome stuff guys! So stoked that Hulu is fixed! One thing though, maybe I am just noticing it now, but it seems that my Mac Mini (1.83 C2D w/4GB ram) has the fan running at 5000 rpm and is noticeably louder than before the update. The temp is only around 120F so it isn’t getting super hot, not sure why the fan is getting so high… was there any tweaks in the code to make the fan run faster?

xain09 March 10, 2009 at 10:09 pm

Great job again. I can’t turn off tv series and movies on the home menu though
Also can’t change the background of certains items on the homescreen. Minor things of course

The Walrus March 11, 2009 at 5:50 am

As Riviera said… My firewall still prompts me for the Media Server. Just wanted to let you know.

Guyzero March 11, 2009 at 5:59 am

I love this app more and more with every update!

Is there an online listing (via browser, outside of Plex) with a listing of current App Store apps? As the list gets bigger, it would be nice to be able to look through what’s there and what’s new from a mouse-driven menu.

Also, then I could browse the apps while at work and look forward to installing them when I get home.

Just a thought.

Simon March 11, 2009 at 12:51 pm

I view my movies & tv sections in library mode, so I was always having to switch to file mode to see the apps in the app store. It appears the new UI has removed the toggle to switch between library / file mode (it used to appear on the right of the screen when viewing your movies for example)

So how do I toggle now and/or how do I launch apps? There really needs to be a dedicated section for launching apps from the app store, it’s really clunky the way it is at the moment.

Koxi March 11, 2009 at 11:51 pm

@Simon

I had the same question, but it got solved

Watch your Movies = Library Mode
Watch your Videos = File Mode

thats it

Vejneke March 12, 2009 at 3:25 pm

Still a longer way to go an inconvenient.. for me anyway. Any way to bring it back to the side menu again?

Hello Elan, you do very great work with the plexapp.
But after the last update to 0.7.13 there are happening strange things in my mac.
If i go to help of the app store, i get into the applications screen. And i cannot access my music library…. the buttons are gone

I hope you can fix it, at this time i get back to V. 0.7.12.

Ow… the menu, maybe it’s an idea to make a combination of the previous spacing and this new one….

Good work and keep on going! Thanks!

Robert March 14, 2009 at 1:35 am

Great update, but I cant turn off “tv-series” and “movies”. I could do that in the previous build. I do like that I can turn off “help” in this update though.

Please enable us to turn off “tv-series” and “movies” again

borja March 14, 2009 at 5:00 am

Hello elan, great work with the update but they are a few bugs with the spansih translation I hope you can fix it in the new version.

It seems to me that the last several releases of the .7 series have been playing 1280×720 mkv with increasing difficulty. Dropping frames and such. I understand that all this open source software is basically reverse engineered. So from the start it is at a severe disadvantage. For instance my machine when running under the free windows 7 beta and Cyberlink PowerDVD 8 can play 1920x1080p blu-rays with zero problems (not counting lossless audio codecs). I think I could upgrade to a nvidia 8500 using unsupported hacks if that would solve this problem.

Maybe there is something in the configuration files I don’t know about that can make use of all the cpu power.
I don’t know as most users seem to have just one core 2 duo processor. On the other hand if this is the limit of Mac OS X I would like to know so I could begin the painful process of making my HTPC windows only.

Chad March 21, 2009 at 8:36 am

A bit OT, but I really like the collar on your dog. Where did you get it?

elan March 21, 2009 at 8:43 am

@Chad: The blue one with the little metal bones on it, I assume. We got it at PetSmart a while ago, I’m not sure if they still carry them.

Interested User March 21, 2009 at 2:30 pm

I am confused about your “mouse” support …

If you enable mouse support, you have the ability to move a cursor around, and to scroll through menus with the scroll wheel.

Conspicuously absent is the ability to _click_ on anything

Mac Pro 1.1 March 28, 2009 at 8:37 pm

I found out on another site while researching the problems I have been having regarding 1920*1080 h.264/mkv files.

It seems that Apple does not allow direct access to hardware like other operating systems do. Maybe with openCL that OS X 10.6 offers will improve this situation. Until then I guess I have to begrudgingly learn to use windows.